American Health Care’s “Original Sin”

Mike Magee As a young surgeon in rural New England, serving farmers and mountain people on the Massachusetts/Vermont border, my growing interest in health management was fueled by two luminaries – one 90 miles to the north and the other 90 miles to the east. One was fast at work mining Medicare databases to expose […]

Why Do Canadian Kids With Cystic Fibrosis Live 10 Years Longer Than American Kids?

Mike Magee At the end of WWII, Canada and the U.S. realized the necessity of focusing on health care infrastructure. There were of course the hundreds of thousands of physical and mental health casualties streaming into overflowing and over-stressed hospitals. Add to this a significant and growing explosion of chronic diseases fed by soldiers and […]

Canada vs. U.S. Health Care: Common Wealth

Mike Magee Republicans this week demonstrated with clarity that further tinkering with our broken health care system will almost certainly add cost and undermine quality and coverage. To begin to define a way back home, we need to initially focus on two fundamental challenges. Problem 1: Defining a National Health Care Vision There is an […]

Canada vs. U.S. Health Care – “You Can’t Handle The Truth!”

Mike Magee In the 2008 classic movie, A Few Good Men, Jack Nicholson explodes under the relentless pressure of prosecutor Tom Cruise, and yells “You can’t handle the truth!” A careful critical examiner of the US health care dilemma in 2017, in the shadow of our neighbor to the north, might easily draw the same […]